Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

A tale of toilet paper and day trippers

Local supply business benefits from busy holiday week

Toilet paper tells the story.

The amount of sanitary wipe rolling out of the warehouse at Slope Side Supply, which provides toilet paper and other essential supplies for hotels, is a good indicator of how busy the resort was over the holiday season.

"We've talked about it before. It's us and the liquor store that are probably the best indicators of how busy Whistler really is," said David Krasny, co-owner of Slope Side Supply.

And busy they were. What he noticed was the massive amount of last-minute pick-up traffic many of the hotels experienced. Slope Side was frantically filling orders throughout the holiday to hotels across the resort, and while hard data for the holiday are not yet available from Tourism Whistler, Krasny said many of the hoteliers he talked to experienced as much as a 10 per cent last minute pick-up.

"Everything was last minute," he said. "Everything was much quicker, more dynamic, and I think the resort came out well. I have heard nothing but good things about people's experiences at the resort. It seemed everyone stepped up because we had to work way harder than we're used to," he said.

The reason, he said, was the weather. And the deals.

"You're actually better off as a hotel manager looking at what kind of week it's going to be on the weather," Krasny said. "If you go to the Weather Network (and it says) that we're going to have a beautiful week, then you know we're going to have these last minute people. If we're forecasting bad weather then you know we're not."

Louise Walker, manager of research for Tourism Whistler, said that last minute bookings have been a key trend since the recession for the entire travel industry, not just Whistler. Consumers now expect good value for money at all price levels and travelers are prepared to wait until the last minute to book.

Tourism Whistler's hotel occupancy numbers won't be available until later this month but she wrote in an email to Pique that room nights for December were originally forecast to decrease two per cent. Recent data suggests that room nights will outperform the forecast and be on par or even slightly ahead of December 2009.

"The week in between Christmas and New Year was looking especially strong and I'd expect occupancy to have been around 90 per cent for the holiday period," she wrote, considering the pace of bookings and all the last minute bookings.

But Tourism Whistler's occupancy numbers only tell a part of the story of the resort's daily, weekly and monthly success.

"Even though the resort monitors its success on the basis of room nights there's no question that day trippers are important," said Whistler Chamber of Commerce president Fiona Famulak. "Because of the highway improvements, it's just easier for people to make the on-the-spot decision from Vancouver or the Lower Mainland, spend the day, which means they're spending money in retail, they're spending money in food and beverage. It's good for business generally."

She said it would benefit the resort if there was a way of changing the way success is measured, by giving equal weight to room nights and sales made throughout the day, but unlike competitive resorts in the U.S., like Vail and Aspen, there is no way to track sales per day through a sales tax. The HST is collected in a bulk way through the province that makes it difficult to compile Whistler numbers.

As a result, the chamber will be issuing the first ever benchmark report this year, surveying its members on a variety of financial and non-financial indicators that will, in part, provide a more detailed picture of how many people are actually milling about the Village every day.

"We need to understand the number of day trippers versus the number of people who are staying overnight," said Famulak.

"I think there's more than one way to monitor how successful Whistler is."

Since there's no mechanism for tracking how many people are actually milling about the Village. Pique polled 18 locally-owned businesses to see how the holiday was for them. Most businesses reported a solid Christmas holiday with a solid mix of day-trippers and destination travelers, including more Australians and South Americans than ever before. Many businesses were reporting 2008 or 2007 sales levels. Some were down, but overall the consensus seems to be that the holiday was successful and business owners are quite pleased.

It seemed that each business's degree of success and clientele varied depending on the type of business. Ski and snowboard retail shops polled experienced generally positive numbers.

Wayne Katz, co-president of the Restaurant Association of Whistler and owner of Zogs, Moguls and Gone Bakery, said the majority of his business was from day-trippers from Washington State and B.C., and while there were still people coming from overseas, the larger percentage was from within the region.

He said all his businesses together are down about seven per cent from the year before.

"But I'm happy with that. My expectation was that it was actually going to be less because of all the stuff that's going on out there in the world. So I'm not disappointed with that."

Dan Ellis, owner of Armchair Books, said business was just slightly above average and his clientele was a combination of day-trippers, annual visitors that stay in town over Christmas, and others staying for longer periods.

"We were going into it worried that we'd have less than we had last year and it turned out to be just as strong, if not a bit stronger," he said, echoing most of the other businesses Pique polled throughout the weekend.